This Week in Digital

Laura Britten

Marketing Manager

February 19th 2016

This week in digital

Cruel Valentine’s Prank

If your boyfriend goes down on one knee with a ring box on Valentine’s Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was about to ask the big question. But for poor Jenny Davies, it turned out to be nothing more than a prank which was filmed by her cruel boyfriend Brad Holmes for his viral Facebook page “Brad’s Dad”. The video which has been viewed over 12 million times since being posted on Valentine’s Day actually shows Brad going down on one knee to ask his girlfriend for a cup of tea – the ring box containing nothing more than a teabag. Jenny told the Mail Online afterwards that she was glad the proposal hadn’t actually happened in that way as she was in her pyjamas lounging on the sofa. The full video can be watched here.

iPhones Cannot Go Back in Time

It seems to be a good week for online pranksters, but this one is rather more malicious. A photo online prompting users of Apple devices to reset the date on their iPhones to 1st January 1970 in order to get a cool retro design, and looking rather official, is actually a scam which will break your phone. Users were meant to find a special Easter Egg when the date was changed however what they really got was once the phone was turned off, rebooted or ran out of battery, the date stuck and the phone was unable to function again. And even Apple themselves don’t seem to have a fix… The company has said that it is working on a software fix that will stop this from happening in the future but it is unlikely those that fell foul of the prank will be able to get into their devices again.

#MakeDinnertimeSpecial

An Australian food company, MasterFoods, has launched a new campaign to make dinnertime special as a reaction to a recent survey that revealed Australians make more of a connection when eating together than doing any other activity. In order to highlight the importance of relationships and mealtimes the company toured around the country interviewing parents and their children asking them “if you could have dinner with anyone alive or dead who would it be?”. The adults responses included Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe and Nelson Mandela. But what will melt your heart are the children’s responses – all of whom responded that the people they’d most like to eat with are their parents or family in general.

Twitter Goes Algorithmic

This week Twitter has made a radical change to the way it shows its Home page feed. Since Twitter’s launch, its feed of tweets has been purely based on a reverse chronological order system so that the newest tweets always stay at the top. However, this is all set to change as Twitter is set to include an algorithm for its feed which will show roughly the first twelve tweets that are most relevant to you despite how old they are. At the moment, this is only a feature that you can opt yourself into but this will be rolling-out as standard very shortly.

And Finally…

We’re heading back to Australia for another story from Google. To celebrate Sydney’s Fair Day this Mardi Gras, Google has created a Places of Pride map. The map is a place for the LGBT community to share special places for them to the world, which could be a place of a proposal, first date or just somewhere you’ve felt the love. The custom rainbow pin has been created as part of the map. The map was set-up by Patrick Hofmann, part of Google Maps Sydney team, who writes in his blog post that “growing up as a rural Canadian farm boy, I hid my homosexuality for years, fearing that I was the ‘only gay in the village’ and that there was no support from my community.” He hopes that the map will celebrate the global reach of the gay community.